Is there a more poisoned chalice in Formula One right now than the role of
Ferrari technical director? It is like the England manager’s job; at once an
honour and a curse given the huge weight of expectation.

In at the deep end? Pat Fry, pictured in 2002, has been tasked to deliver success at FerrariPhoto: ANDREW CROWLEY

Back in the early 2000s, when Michael Schumacher won his five straight world titles, the technical team at Maranello was very stable. Ross Brawn ran the show under disciplinarian team principal Jean Todt, with Rory Byrne the car’s chief designer.

In the four years since they left the technical side has seen major upheaval. Ferrari have promoted and dispensed with Luca Baldisserri and Chris Dyer, who performed senior operations roles, and then – earlier this summer – Brawn’s successor as technical director Aldo Costa.

The Italian paid the price for his failure to match Adrian Newey, his opposite number at Red Bull (and, if reports are to be believed, the man Ferrari really wanted). The fact that no one else has managed to match Newey over the past three years was by the by.

Costa couldn’t say he wasn’t warned. Ferrari’s president, Luca di Montezemolo, made it perfectly clear what he expected of his race team back in January.

"I still wake up at night thinking of the race in Abu Dhabi,” Montezemolo said of the strategic error at last year’s season finale, which handed the drivers’ title to Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel. "But we cost ourselves most in the early part of the year. This year we must make a good start.”

They didn’t. Neither Alonso nor his team mate Felipe Massa finished higher than fourth at the season’s first three races. Costa was gonewithin two months. “This cannot and must not be our level,” Montezemolo warned.

Given all of the above Pat Fry, the Englishman who has taken over the reigns from Costa, could be forgiven if he felt some trepidation as he oversees the design of the 2012 machine.

Fry only arrived at Maranello last winter, after 18 years at McLaren, but already he has had three jobs within the Ferrari technical team culminating in his current role as technical director.

“Doing something different is always good,” he says diplomatically. “I was at McLaren for over 18 years. Ferrari is different but it’s great to do different things. It’s been a good experience for me.”

So is the team now settled? Somewhat worryingly for Ferrari fans, Fry reports that the latest reshuffle is not yet complete and that the team is “still working out” how things will work next year.

“I think we’re slowly getting things in place,” he says, “What I joined to do was to look and see where we needed to improve. [Ferrari wanted] to have someone looking across different parts of the organisation without really a day job as such.

“But then I took over running the race team and now I’ve taken over the technical director role.

“We’re just working out at the moment exactly how things will work next year. But hopefully it will give me a little bit more time to think of what we need to do to make the car quicker.”

“If anything you might say we haven’t been as joined up as we need to be. So we made a few changes back in May and I think out of that things are starting to work a bit better.

“We need to make a few more small changes to get things working the way I’d like to see but I don’t think there will be any major upheaval.”

He had better hope not. This is a results business – nowhere more so than at Ferrari – and Montezemolo is likely to demand a fast start again next year.

So is he confident that the car can be quick out of the blocks in 2012? “[The car] is certainly a reasonable amount different from what we’ve got now,” he says, weighing his words carefully.

“The question is always: are you doing enough? But at this time of year how would you ever know? We’re doing as much as we can.

“I think the guys and girls are doing a great job. But we won’t know until Melbourne next year.”

There have been reports recently that Ferrari’s 2012 machine is more “aggressive” in its design but Fry points out that ‘aggressive’ is a relative term.

“I think we’ve taken a few more risks and made bigger changes than we have in the past,” he says, “but I don’t know how you describe aggressive really…

“The rules still allow you to do a few things differently but there are 12 teams out there looking at the same set of rules so I would be surprised if our car ended up looking a whole lot different to anyone else’s.”

Whether Fry is the answer, whether he will be given enough time to be the answer, remains to be seen.

A softly-spoken man of 47, he does not look as if he is going to pull up trees but then neither did Brawn. Fry's calm, rational approach may be just what Ferrari need.

In 2009, the three-time world champion and former Ferrari driver Niki Lauda made the following observation about the Scuderia’s glory years in the early 2000s:

“Ross, because he is English, was the ideal bridge between the Italians, who all are about spaghetti and romance, and Michael, with his clinical German efficiency. Now the Italians are running it all. Does it work? It could be chaos.”

Lauda was being facetious, of course. But stereotypes aside, he had opened up an interesting debate. Whether by design or not, the years following the break-up of the Todt-Brawn-Byrne axis at Maranello saw Italians occupy the top posts; Stefano Domenicali as team principal, Costa as technical director and so on.

It begs the question; are some nationalities better at performing certain tasks than others? Perhaps the Latin temperament is superior at fostering a warm spirit within a team, say? Perhaps the cool, linear Anglo-Saxon brain is better suited to deciding strategies during the course of a race?

Has Fry been brought in to keep the Italians’ feet nailed to the floor? To be the ‘bridge’ as Lauda described it?

“I don’t know really,” he says. “I hadn’t really thought about it. There’s certainly more passion here I would say. I suppose I’m now the constant. Everyone’s swinging from one extreme to the other and I’m in the middle, whereas I suppose in the other place [McLaren] it would have been me doing the swinging maybe.

“But in terms of the quality of the work on the analysis side of things, it’s very similar to be honest.”

“Ross [was] obviously very organised and methodical. If you plot out the whole of the 1990s Ferrari’s reliability it was something like 25 per cent. Then Ross arrived when it stepped up to 90 per cent within six months, which was quite telling in terms of putting in structural changes to ensure that.

"You need a logical approach, to keep pushing on the right things, and to make sure everyone is aligned on that.

“But I don’t see that I have changed the way, fundamentally, that the race team is working.”

Maybe not. But he had better hope Ferrari get back winning soon. It’s Fry’s head on the chopping block now.